Rihannabyname of Robyn Rihanna Fenty ( born February 20, 1988 , St. Michael parish, BarbadosBarbadian pop and rhythm-and-blues (R&B) singer who became a worldwide star in the early 21st century, known for her distinctive and versatile voice and for her fashionable appearance.

Fenty grew up in Barbados with a Barbadian father and a Guyanese mother. As a child, she listened to Caribbean music, such as reggae, as well as American hip-hop and R&B. She especially enjoyed singing and won a high-school talent show with a rendition of a Mariah Carey song. About the same time, she started a girl group with two friends, and in 2004 she attracted the attention of Evan Rogers, an American record producer. He helped Fenty record a demo that led to an audition with the rapper Jay-Z, who at the time headed the Def Jam record label, and he soon signed the budding vocalist. For her professional career, she adopted her middle name, Rihanna.

With the effervescent dancehall-inflected single Pon de Replay (2005), Rihanna immediately captured an international audience. The song’s success buoyed sales for her debut full-length recording, Music of the Sun (2005), on which conventional R&B ballads shared space with Caribbean-flavoured dance-pop that showcased her melodious Barbadian lilt. Rihanna soon followed with the album A Girl like Me (2006), featuring the up-tempo club-oriented S.O.S. The song, which was built around a sample of Soft Cell’s 1981 new-wave hit Tainted Love, became Rihanna’s first to top the Billboard singles chart.

For Good Girl Gone Bad (2007), Rihanna sought to transform her youthful image. With the assistance of such high-profile collaborators as Timbaland and Justin Timberlake, she abandoned the tropical rhythms that had adorned her first two albums and recorded a collection of sleek R&B that presented her as a fiercely independent and rebellious woman. (She also unveiled a spiky asymmetrical hairstyle.) The gambit paid off, as the album sold several million copies worldwide, and its anthemic lead single, Umbrella, featuring an introductory rap from Jay-Z, became one of the year’s biggest hits and earned Rihanna a Grammy Award.

In early 2009 Rihanna was beaten by her boyfriend, fellow R&B star Chris Brown, in an incident that was widely covered by tabloid news and gossip blogs. (He was subsequently Following their separation, he was convicted of assault. ) The album that followed later that year, Rated R, much of which she cowrote, was marked by icily stark production and brooding lyrics that touched on revenge. Although her sales declined somewhat, she scored another major hit with Rude Boy. Rihanna returned to less-portentous fare on the dance-friendly Loud (2010). In early 2011 the album’s sexually provocative single S&M became her 10th number one Billboard hit—which made her, at age 23, the youngest artist ever to reach that milestone. Included in the total were prominent collaborations with hip-hop artists T.I. and Eminem that appeared on albums of theirs; many felt her vocals on the latter’s Love the Way You Lie (2010) lent resonance to the song’s depiction of an abusive relationship.

Rihanna maintained a steely and seductive persona on the albums Talk That Talk (2011), which produced the infectious international hit We Found Love, and Unapologetic (2012), which was anchored by the starry-eyed Diamonds. The latter release also controversially featured a duet with Brown. In 2012 she , and in early 2013 she confirmed that the two had begun dating again. Rihanna made her acting debut as a scrappy sailor in the big-budget action movie Battleship(2012).